Can we please, PLEASE for gods sake just all agree that arch is not and will never be a good beginner distro no matter how many times you fork it?
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Then whatever a modern OS is under your model is not an OS I'm willing to use. I've seen Win 11. I'm going to stick with 10, as I stuck with XP through Vista, had a second machine with 7 through 8(.x), and then surrendered and used Win10 when the 32-bit Win7 machine finally stopped working for love or money.
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Arch can be forked into a beginner distro, just look at SteamOS, but one of the major advantages of Arch is the AUR and to be able to use it you have to have packages in the same (or similar) enough version to Arch, and THAT is not beginner friendly. But having an Arch fork that can't access the AUR loses most of the reason people would want to use Arch, so you end up with distros aimed at beginners that are also running bleeding edge packages which is a recipe for disaster.
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I'm not sure a newcomer will notice the difference between xorg and wayland?
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I've been using Garuda, and though I'm not a beginner, it's been great. It's a simpler experience than I had with Fedora, and better than Mint or Ubuntu, though those were about a decade ago. Arch is a fantastic base. Pure Arch is probably bad for beginners, but there are great Arch-based distros out there. SteamOS as another example of this. This post is bad.
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Man, I'm just glad to finally see someone else saying they have issues with Fedora. Everyone seems to think it's amazing and stable but it never lasts more than a few months for me. I don't do any tinkering or hacking or anything, just web browsing, Python coding, some light gaming with Steam. Arch and Debian both hold up great for me doing the same stuff.
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The point of Arch is not that it's hard to install the point is that it's modular and you can choose exactly what you need. So in order ton maintain it you may need to know about pipewire, bluez, Wayland, synaptic, tlp, ...
One you know the name of most modules and graphical application it's indeed pretty easy because Arch's wiki is great. But I don't think it's a great way to discover the ecosystem and you would probably not benefit from Arch specificities compared to another distro.
I think the only person I would recomand this to would be a computer scientist who needs to learn as much as possible about Linux in two months.
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To me, every distro that seriously requires you to read through all changelogs before updating is BS, and it doesn't solve a basic problem. No one but in their sane mind will do this, and the system will break.
That's why, while I respect the upstream Arch, I'd say you should be insane for running it and trying to make things stable, and mocking people for not reading the changelogs is missing the point entirely. Even the best of us failed.
Arch is entirely about "move fast and break stuff".
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Honestly, as someone who ran Arch and its derivatives, no one should be running upstream Arch but the testers.
No amount of experience or expertise will save you from breaking it. It WILL break, and you'll be mocked for that as well by "Arch elitists" who will then face the same issue.
That's why Linux veterans are rarely using Arch. It's good for its purpose, it's very important both for downstream Arch and for the entire Linux community, but it is NOT the distro you should run on your PC.
Go Fedora. Go Debian. Go to the downstream distros if you're strongly into Arch, take Garuda for example. Make your machine actually work.
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Arch is good but tbh if you arent prepared for having to keep everything up to date and if ur a beginner in general u are not gonna have a good time
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The install guide is not 50 pages-long, common!
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That very setup is why I do not recommend it to newbies who don't have someone experienced around. Debian, even Debian 12, is not holding your hand and directing you. You'll have to figure a lot out by yourself, and this adds to the steep learning curve.
Also, a very slow update cycle means the newbie will be stuck with outdated packages (sure, flatpaks are there, but the base system will be old, like, very old). And new hardware might face issues.
To me, the perfect pipeline is something like Linux Mint, then Fedora, then either Arch derivatives or Debian, depending on what serves you best. Alternatively, if you don't mind some challenge after an easy entry, start out with Manjaro and then get another Arch. But that one's more controversial.
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Is there really enough of an epidemic of newbies being recommended Arch to warrant this amount of ire? All I ever hear is how Arch is the “hardcore” distro and beginners should all use Linux Mint.
I’m someone who has only ever poked around with Linux Mint on a thumb drive a few times to see what it’s like and thinking, “Yep. This is a working operating system.” and then going back to Windows because there was never any compelling reason to switch.
But I recently decided to have a dedicated PC with Linux on it and I chose CachyOS because I want to play games. (Yes, I know you can game on other distros.) And I’m… fine. I’m computer literate, I did my research, and I knew that using an Arch-based distros was “being thrown into the deep end.” But I followed the instructions, as well as some advice, and the setup completed without any issues.
I’m using my PC and things “just work.” Apparently I’m just an update away from everything collapsing into smoldering wreckage. If that happens, I’ll try to fix it, and maybe I’ll learn something in the process. If not, I’ll try to keep my files backed up so I can restore things. Or maybe I’ll decide that I hate it and try something else, but… so far so good.
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The only thing that ever made Arch a worse distro for beginners was the barbones installer and initial setup. That was rectified years ago.
If you have wheel access any distro is pretty easy to fuck up.
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FOSS is great but so much if it has just absolute garbage documentation.
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And not just "a beach on the ocean", but literally just the open ocean.
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Arch is for control freaks, which means it takes a lot of work and patient to get it to work for your specific needs. If you don't have the time and patient for that (which is more then understandable) then you shouldn't use it.
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He's exaggerating a little bit, but he's not entirely wrong. Arch does have bleeding edge packages, and if you haven't ran into an issue because of that you probably haven't been using it for long. Now, it almost never is system breaking bad, but it might be GUI breaking bad, or it might require editing configs by hand, and I've lost count of the amount of times I've seen people complain that an update broke something only to be a pacsave/pacnew file. Arch philosophy is incompatible with people who're learning the system now and just want stuff to work. Just because it worked for you doesn't mean it will for others.
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Yeah if you don't tech a kid how to do something and they don't learn it themselves they won't learn it. A lot of kids are way more willing to learn things than people give them credit for because no one is putting in the effort to teach them.
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this guy is so damn right i cant argue. arch isnt hard to use, whats hard is experiencing different things and learning
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I'm sure someone first distro was Gentoo and they had no issues.
